Chapter 13 - Olivia
The infirmary ceiling had a crack she hadn’t noticed the first time, running diagonally from the overhead light to the corner above the window, thin as a pencil line.
She’d been staring at it for six minutes because Caitlynn had told her not to move, and the crack was better than thinking about what was happening inside her forearm.
“Breathe,” Caitlynn said.
“If you tell me to breathe one more time, I will stop doing it out of spite.”
“I believe that completely.” Caitlynn’s fingertips hovered above the shard’s entry point, golden light pooling in her palms. The warmth of it sank through Olivia’s skin. “I’m going to start on the second anchor. This one is deeper.”
Olivia stared at the crack in the ceiling. She didn’t ask how much deeper, because asking would mean she was bracing, and bracing would mean this was something she needed to brace for. She refused to admit it.
Caitlynn’s magic pressed inward.
The pain arrived without warning—a bright, surgical thread that pulled tight along the inside of her forearm, hooked into the muscle beneath her elbow, and dragged.
Her vision narrowed. Her back arched off the table before she clamped it down, shoulder blades pressing against cold metal, her free hand seizing the table’s edge hard enough that the tendons in her wrist stood out.
She heard herself make a sound, short and bitten off, the kind she’d have been ashamed of if the shame center of her brain had been operational, which it wasn’t, because everything above the neck had gone to white noise while everything below it screamed.
“Stay with me.” Caitlynn’s voice, close, steady. “I can see the filament. It’s threaded around the nerve. I have to separate them.”
Olivia’s teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached. The golden light pulsed deeper, and the shard answered—that sullen purple flare she could feel in the void where her wolf had been. Her body tried to shift, the reflex coming from somewhere primal, older than thought.
Her eyes burned. She stared at the crack in the ceiling and refused to blink.
Viktor was at the door. She’d known he was there since she’d walked in, the way she knew where the examination table was and where Caitlynn’s instruments were laid out—background information, spatial awareness, nothing that required attention.
He’d positioned himself against the wall beside the door frame.
She could feel him through the bond, a low, steady pulse on the left side of her chest. He was watching.
Let him watch.
She was sweating. Her hair stuck to her forehead, and the shirt she’d worn clung to the dip of her waist, the curve of her stomach, the places where sweat collected and fabric turned honest. On any other day, she would have pulled the shirt loose, adjusted, performed the constant small corrections she’d been making since she was fourteen.
She couldn’t move. Caitlynn’s magic had her forearm pinned in golden light. The pain had stripped her down to what lived underneath the corrections she was so used to.
“Almost,” Caitlynn murmured. Her fingers trembled—fine, barely visible, the cost of threading magic between nerve and crystal with the precision of a watchmaker disarming a bomb. “The filament is releasing. Hold on.”
The final pull was the worst. A sensation of tearing that came from inside the muscle, the bond the shard had built between itself and her body, wrenching free.
Olivia’s breath locked in her chest, white spots bloomed at the edges of her vision, and for three seconds, she was somewhere outside herself, floating above the table.
Then it stopped.
The relief didn’t rush in. It seeped, slow, warmth returning to frozen fingers—a gradual loosening of everything that had been clenched. She lay on the table, her every breath shaking.
“Second anchor is clear,” Caitlynn said, her voice rougher now, the effort showing in the cracks.
She withdrew her hands and pressed them flat against her own thighs, steadying the tremor.
“One more session. Next week. The last one should be—” She paused, reconsidered whatever she’d been about to promise. “It’ll be the last one.”
Olivia said nothing. She stayed there longer than she should have.
Caitlynn cleaned the instruments, wrapped the crystal-tipped probes in their leather roll, moved around the room in the quiet way she moved when she was giving someone space without drawing attention to the giving.
Olivia heard it all—the clink of glass, the rustle of leather, the soft click of a cabinet closing—and she let the sounds carry her without answering them, because getting up required the version of herself she wore for the world, and that version had gone somewhere unreachable.
The door opened and closed. Caitlynn’s footsteps faded down the corridor.
Viktor didn’t leave.
She heard him cross the room—three steps, four, quiet for a man his size. A cupboard opened. Water ran. A glass appeared on the table beside her head, close enough that she could see the condensation forming on its surface without lifting up.
She turned her face toward it. Viktor was already moving again, adjusting the window to let in cooler air and pulling the overhead lamp to the side so the light no longer fell directly on her face.
Small corrections, made without asking, each one addressing a discomfort she hadn’t voiced—the heat that had built in the room during the extraction, the brightness that needled her dilated eyes, the thirst she’d been aware of since the first filament tore loose and hadn’t had the energy to fix.
He didn’t touch her. He didn’t speak. He adjusted the room around her the way he’d adjust a watch—finding the fault, correcting it, moving on—and when he was done, he returned to the wall by the door and just stood there.
She picked up the glass. Drank. The water was cold enough to feel in her chest, and her hand trembled against the glass, and she held it with both hands rather than one and didn’t care who saw.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice smaller than she would have liked it.
He nodded once from the door—the nod that meant acknowledged and usually meant moving on, but this time carried something heavier, a weight she felt land in the room and stay.
She sat up slowly. Swung her legs over the edge of the table.
The cold air from the window moved across her damp skin.
She wrapped her good arm around herself and didn’t hurry, because Viktor wasn’t watching her the way she’d expected.
He was simply there, in the room she was in, and his presence was the steadiest thing she’d felt all day, but she didn’t know what to do with that, so she stood up, drank the rest of the water, and walked out.
Her legs held. She made sure of it.